PCM Audio | Part 1: What is PCM?

It’s been a long time since I posted anything. Most of my free time has been spent working on my ventrilo client for linux project. Of course, that project adds tons of things to discuss, such as how PCM audio works. I’m going to make this a multi-part series, because there is so much information to discuss.

When I first started working on that project, I knew nothing about how audio worked. I knew a little bit about encoders and decoders, but not really the inner workings. What are they encoding/decoding? It turns out, that the answer is PCM (pulse control modulation) audio. After messing with PCM for a few months, there are a lot of things that are painfully obvious now that were confusing. This guide is meant to be an introduction to at least give you the working knowledge you’ll need to ask proper questions and perform simple tasks. So let’s get started…

If you’ve ever used a computer MP3 player, you’ve probably seen those options to display the waveform of the audio or the little bars that pop up and down showing you treble and bass levels. What those are measuring is the PCM audio as it plays it. So what does all that crap mean?

Let’s start with the basics. There’s five terms that are important to know for PCM:

Sample Rate

Real actual audio (like someone talking to you in person) is transmitted as a wave. PCM is a digital representation of that audio wave at a specified sample rate. The sample rate is measured in Hz (cycles per second) and more often in kilohertz. So when you hear someone talk about about 128kHz vs. 160kHz audio, what they’re talking about is the sample rate. If you’ve ever done integrals in calculus, it’s a lot like that. The higher the sample rate, the better your quality (at the cost of size). There is no guessing here. You need to know what the sample rate is.

Sign

Whether the data is signed or unsigned. It is almost always signed. Treating a signed PCM stream as unsigned will hurt your ears… painfully… (I speak from experience here).

Sample Size

This determines how many bits make up one sample. 16-bit seems to be the most common.

Byte Ordering

Byte ordering refers to little-endian vs. big-endian data. If you don’t know what endian-ness means, you can probably assume little endian. If you have the option to choose endian for your data, you should always choose little-endian.

Number of channels

I’m mostly going to cover mono (1 channel), but multichannel PCM is usually handled by interleaving the PCM samples. Don’t worry about this for now. Once you understand mono, stereo is easy.

Add those five things together and you’ll come up with a description of a PCM stream. For example: signed 16-bit little-endian mono @ 44.1kHz. In order to actually play audio, you’ll need to know those 5 things.

Various sound devices support various types of streams, but there’s usually a set list of sign, sample size, and endian-ness options. Different APIs use different constants to specify, but usually you’ll see them as something like S16LE (signed 16-bit little-endian) or S32BE (signed 32-bit big-endian) and so on.